Dream Log: March 20, 2001 (idea)

I had got a good idea: How about building a new type of high-speed
railroad network in which the passengers don't pay for
tickets... trains go from one station to another in a loop, and
passengers are automatically charged the price of that part of trip.

I was preparing to go from Kajaani to Oulu - and got to one of
these trains in Kajaani. The train had only two cars... I got to the
first one, and climbing inside was tricky.

There were no chairs or any lights inside, or anything - worse than
normal trains. But I could take that, because the price was really
cheap. One of the passengers asked me if the second car was any better
- I told him that it wasn't, it was even smaller than this one.

The train driver / conductor was a sadist and took the
instructions he had got very, very literally. (He was getting part of
our payments himself, obviously.) The first part of the trip was
actually fairly uninteresting and went quick. But then...

There were no tracks.

So, obviously, the train got to ground, drove around using the normal
roads, and somehow ended up to the normal tracks again. Everyone in
the train seemed to be extremely shocked every time something like
this happened.

I don't remember the exact details of this trip, but at least in one
point, we had done another skip from track to road to grass to track
again, and the driver charged us extra for that. Then, at one point,
he used one stretch of track, in front of a big apartment building
made of red bricks. As the train came to the yard, and there were no
tracks, the driver quoted one guy called WWWWolf about a plan that was
"downright suicidal" - and jumped the train on this small track (that
went to opposite direction and formed a ramp... we screamed, the
train spun in air and crashed on the ground, we all flew out and the
train somehow escaped to the next station quickly.

My first thing to do was to state that I was misquoted, of
course. =) The next thing was that I swore the train driver was
probably going to charge extra for this trick too, and hoped the train
would stay on the station.

It was a long walk to the station. I walked through a park in which
Swedish-speaking folks were walking. (Some of them were talking of
Linux.) Each was carrying some item, but the items were just
black-and-white drawings, printed on white cardboard and
cut to shape leaving some margin. I wondered why this was so.

So I somehow took one of those cardboard things from my pocket. It
was an electric screwdriver... I took the overused pose, with this
picture thing as the pistol, and said "My name is Bond. James
Bond."... I found a picture of small, pistol-shaped blowtorch from
my pocket too, and found that even more gun-like than the screwdriver
so the lame Bond imitations got more speed...

I got to a mall that was just before the railway station. I walked
around it until I got to hardware department - and asked them if they
had one of those blowtorches. They didn't have those, because they
didn't have any of the transformers those things needed.

Somehow, this blowtorch image had turned into a real blowtorch,
with the a long cable that was cut. The salesperson asked to get it
back, and his assistant commented something about fools who don't even
remember to unplug their tools before walking away.

Embarassment! I went out of the mall through the
backdoor. One of the passengers of the train - a woman - had bought
something that resembled a crossbreed of golf car and VW Bug, and
was testing it on the mall backyard. She asked me to come with her to
the railway station.